Nothing you do matters if you’re not there when it happens.
From The Anticipation of Loss, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The man who feeds the jays was at the bench again today, but he spent the whole hour with his phone an inch from his nose, tossing peanuts by feel. Three jays, one of them the loud one with the bad tail, and he saw none of it. For years I thought the worst thing a person could do with an afternoon was waste it on something small; now I think the size of the thing is beside the point. Nothing you do matters if you're not there when it happens. He stood up, brushed the shells off his coat, and went home having fed nobody as far as he knows. I kept the shells. Switch came by at dusk and asked what I was looking at and I could not say, except that the bench was empty and still somehow occupied.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- It's hard to say thank you when thank you means goodbye.
- Many things are given away, but nothing real is ever lost.
- A strawberry uneaten will not long remain a strawberry.
- A life with endless sunshine would be a life without starry nights.
- Everything is new, but few things are seen anew.
- Looking way ahead is not very farsighted.